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7 (Gross) Foods That You’ll Be Eating in the Future

From cockroach milk to jellyfish.

Humans are always finding new sources of foods in the wild, rediscovering long-forgotten foods, and inventing their own foods.

In the future, as the global population swells, climate change increases, and staple food sources are strained to the limit, humans will have to get even more ingenious with their diets.

Here are seven foods that you could be chowing down on in the future.

Mealworms

You can keep your windowsill herb garden for now — but in the future your kitchen might have a metal cabinet for harvesting mealworms.

Not only are these little squirmy things packed with protein, fiber, omega-3 fatty acids, and vitamins, but they’re also way more environmentally friendly than red meat. Harvesting mealworms generates just 4% of the greenhouse emissions that producing red meat does.

More than 2 billion people are eating insects already, so it can’t be that gross. According to chef and mealworm entrepreneur Katharina Unger, they smell somewhere in between mushroom and meat,, have a bit of a crunch, and have a slightly nutty flavor. They’re perfect for meatballs or as an addition to a salad.

Cockroach milk

If you’ve ever seen a cockroach skitter around your apartment, the thought of milking it for nutrition probably hasn’t crossed your mind.

To call cockroach milk, “milk,” is a bit of stretch in the first place. These hideous bugs don’t produce milk like cows do. Instead, cockroaches develop crystal-like substances inside their guts that are used to nourish their young.

Seaweed

Seaweed is the poster child of environmentally friendly. It might taste slimy, but each crunch of seaweed is a crunch toward a healthier planet because seaweed has a negative carbon footprint. It’s also full of nutrients.

Currently, humanity gets 2 percent of its food from the oceans. All the world’s agricultural output could be done in 1 percent of the ocean’s surface area. To put that into perspective: humanity allocates about 40 percent of all land mass and 75 percent of all fresh water to agriculture.

GMOs

This is a bit of a catch-all. If you’re opposed to GMOs today, you might feel differently in the next decade as their benefits become more well-known.

GMO crops can be more resilient in the face of droughts and floods; need less pesticides; and be more nutritious.

The whole process is a just a super-accelerated version of artificial selection — something that farmers have practiced for millennia.

Stay tuned for a Global Citizen explainer on GMOs in the weeks ahead.

One thing that’s clear — the world needs more food solutions to support a growing population with declining resources. While some of these might gross you out now, they very well could be the food of the future.